TV review: My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, Coach Trip, EastEnders

Published on Thursday 11 February 2010 12:53

Here's a bit of insider industry knowledge for you: if you've ever wondered how the geniuses who work in television come up with their programme titles, then I can reveal that it is courtesy of work experience interns locked in a filing cupboard with nothing but a packet of darts and movie posters for Strictly Ballroom, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and School of Rock.

Programme ideas are slipped under the door daily and the prisoners must, in a desperate bid for food and water, throw darts at the posters and come up with something vaguely appropriate. Amnesty International is on the case as we speak. So remember: every time you tune into a programme like MY BIG FAT GYPSY WEDDING, an intern earns their crust.

Daft title aside, this Cutting Edge documentary provides insight into an oft-maligned and misunderstood community. It focuses on four gypsy and traveller weddings as a way of exploring their fiercely moral yet in some ways paradoxical culture.

With the full consent of their families, girls from gypsy and traveller communities are often engaged at 14 and married within a few years. Their weddings are riotously extravagant affairs, with each bride and family competing to stage a bigger and better event than any seen before. This is why you can always recognise a gypsy wedding if the bride is dressed as a voluminous snowball with a train the length of an ogre's duvet. Some dresses weigh more than the brides themselves, and often leave them physically scarred as they attempt to squeeze into their Cinderella coaches.

And yet fuelled by tabloid scaremongering, churches and venues are often reticent to welcome them, and sometimes cancel at the last minute when they realise who they've booked. In order to keep their identity secret, bride, groom and guests often don't know the location until the day of the wedding itself.

But why, in this supposedly enlightened age, are they still regarded as pariahs? Devised with the aim of countering prejudice, the programme gains uncommon access to a community at odds with its damaged reputation. Ironically, gypsies and travellers probably adhere to stricter moral values than those who look down on them. They are also insular and self-protective people intransigently wary of the outside world, although perhaps that's hardly surprising. But this isolation also encourages some uncomfortable beliefs. Mixing with non-travellers (or "country people") is discouraged, at least as far as marriage is concerned. This obsession with cultural purity is highly dubious, although one contributor flatly denies that it is racist. After all, some of his best friends are country people.

Sex before marriage is also forbidden, but the girls are allowed to dress in a manner Peter Stringfellow would probably regard as a tad provocative.

The biggest concern, however, is whether these girls are emotionally ready to rush into marriage and leave the security of their families. They have been encouraged since childhood to fantasise about their fairytale weddings, but what of the long-term consequences, especially within a culture which frowns upon divorce?

It is perhaps inevitable that at times the programme feels like a kind of anthropological study, but although it regards these gaudy weddings with a hint of mockery, it feels good-natured rather than nasty. The same could almost be said for COACH TRIP, an afternoon reality series following a bunch of disparate holidaymakers on a worldwide mystery tour. I say almost, because it teeters precariously between cheekiness and sneering. Or maybe I just feel guilty about chuckling when a pair of harmless, if boring, pensioners are introduced to the dilapidated strains of the Steptoe and Son theme tune.

Yes, Coach Trip is another one of those programmes inviting us to laugh at people who aren't us, but it's less hateful than most. Clearly hoping to emulate the popularity of the similarly throwaway Come Dine With Me, it wears its irreverence like a bum-bag full of euros.

The premise then: seven couples fight to keep their place on the trip by voting off their rival travel-mates. Naturally, this causes a great deal of embarrassment and awkwardness, especially as they all seem like essentially nice people, although admittedly some of them could be caricatures from Paul Whitehouse's Bellamy's People: the coach even has a Union Jack emblazoned on its roof la the Bellamy Mobile. You've got camp, stupid fashionistas (ie two unemployed blokes in ostentatious trousers), salt-of-the-sod northerners, a goth teenager and her mousy mother, the aforementioned patriotic pensioners, and an unstoppably cheerful tour guide from the Maplins school of fun. Coach Trip is fluff, but it's the kind of fluff you may well pick at until your jumper is threadbare. There's a metaphor in there if you want it.

Finally, to celebrate 25 years of bad actors saying "get aht!" while struggling to appear menacing, EASTENDERS presents its first ever live episode in which Ricky and Bianca get married, Archie's killer is revealed, and most excitingly, laundrette owner Mr Papadopoulos encases Albert Square under a giant bio-dome in a bid for world domination. Hopefully.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding

Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm

Coach Trip

Monday to Friday, Channel 4, 4:55pm

EastEnders

Friday, BBC1, 8pm

&#149 This article first appeared in The Scotsman, Saturday February 13, 2010